Clara Chong

1 week ago | medium.com | Clara Chong

AI tools & vibe coding have hidden tradeoffs. Here’s how to use them wisely and why open source is a great secret weapon. AI-assisted coding is here to stay. Tools like Cursor, V0, and Lovable have dramatically lowered the barrier to entry — building dashboards, pipelines, or entire apps can now be done in a fraction of the time. I use these tools daily, and they’ve definitely made me faster.

1 month ago | towardsdatascience.com | Clara Chong

coding is here to stay. Tools like Cursor, V0, and Lovable have dramatically lowered the barrier to entry — building dashboards, pipelines, or entire apps can now be done in a fraction of the time. I use these tools daily, and they’ve definitely made me faster. But as the codebase gets more complex, the tradeoffs become clear: cryptic bugs, tangled logic, and hours lost debugging code I didn’t truly understand. AI tools are great — especially for beginners — but they come with a quiet cost.

Feb 27, 2025 | towardsdatascience.com | Clara Chong |Srijanie Dey

Welcome to part 2 of my LLM deep dive. If you’ve not read Part 1, I highly encourage you to check it out first. Previously, we covered the first two major stages of training an LLM:Pre-training — Learning from massive datasets to form a base model. Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) — Refining the model with curated examples to make it useful. Now, we’re diving into the next major stage: Reinforcement Learning (RL).

Feb 3, 2025 | towardsdatascience.com | Clara Chong |Shreya Rao

Real-time communication is everywhere – live chatbots, data streams, or instant messaging. WebSockets are a powerful enabler of this, but when should you use them? How do they work, and how do they differ from traditional HTTP requests? This article was inspired by a recent system design interview – "design a real time messaging app" – where I stumbled through some concepts. Now that I’ve dug deeper, I’d like to share what I’ve learned so you can avoid the same mistakes.

Feb 3, 2025 | medium.com | Clara Chong

How WebSockets work, its tradeoffs, and how to design a real time messaging appClara Chong·FollowPublished inTowards Data Science·8 min read·--Image by Kelly from UnsplashReal-time communication is everywhere — live chatbots, data streams, or instant messaging. WebSockets are a powerful enabler of this, but when should you use them? How do they work, and how do they differ from traditional HTTP requests?